More Than Family
by Sashile
Summary: Another story to follow "Family First". Tony DiNozzo travels to Paris with Tali and finds more than he expected.
1. Chapter 1

**More Than Family**

 _A/N: Good evening from Kuwait! I had all these grand plans for my deployment and all the writing I would do during my downtime, and, well, that didn't really happen. Sorry. But I was re-reading my NCIS series, and that made me want the canon Tony and Ziva to have a happy ending, too. I know I've already given you one ending beyond "Family First," but here's another (in three chapters). I'll let you, my lovely readers, decide which you would like._

* * *

Tony DiNozzo glanced down at the stroller, confirming what he had suspected: the full morning of exploring Paris, followed by more food than someone her size should be able to eat, had knocked his daughter out cold.

 _His daughter_. It had been almost a month since Tali had made her appearance in his life, and he simultaneously couldn't believe he had a child and couldn't believe there was a time when he hadn't, until he remembered those moments that he had never gotten to experience: finding out Ziva was pregnant, her being born, her first smile, first words, first steps. Dead or not, he still got angry at Ziva for thinking so little of him that she believed he would think of her and Tali as an inconvenience, that she didn't know him well enough to know that he would have dropped everything and gone wherever she wanted to be with them.

He fumbled in his pocket for his card key; finding it, he fumbled with inserting it in the lock without jostling the stroller and waking Tali. He may have only been a parent for a few weeks, but he had quickly learned that there was fury like a tiny woman woken from slumber.

He walked through the door, his eyes still down on the stroller. When he looked up, his eyes widened, only the fear of waking Tali keeping him from calling out. His right hand dropped immediately to his hip, before he remembered he no longer carried a weapon, and even if he had, the person standing in front of him in his previously locked hotel room would not be a person to draw a weapon on.

"Tony—" She stopped talking at the finger he automatically brought to his lips, then used to point down at the stroller, where Tali was still fast asleep. Her eyes widened at the delayed realization that her daughter was there; her previous statement to DiNozzo forgotten, she stepped forward and walked toward Tali.

"She's asleep," DiNozzo said softly.

"Yes," Ziva David replied simply. She leaned down and gently, more gently than DiNozzo had ever seen her do anything, lifted his— _their_ —sleeping daughter from the stroller.

" _Ima_ ," Tali murmured, her arms going around her mother's neck but her eyes remaining closed, still apparently asleep. Ziva didn't meet his eye as she carried the sleeping toddler into the bedroom of the hotel suite to put Tali down for a proper nap.

DiNozzo remained where he was standing when she returned to the living room a minute later, a fact which apparently amused Ziva, based on the expression on her face. "You're dead," he finally said, his voice flat.

The amused expression grew into something more akin to a smirk. "I assure you, Tony, I am not," she said. She walked over to where he was standing, her eyes not leaving his. She stopped a few inches from him, tilting her head up to lightly press her lips against his. He still didn't move, and when she stepped back, she saw barely concealed anger in his eyes.

"You _died_ ," he said, his voice now emphatic. "I saw the fire and read the report, and when I was trying to deal with that and with Kort and _everything_ , I found out that you _hid our daughter_ from me. You didn't think enough of me to tell me that _we have a daughter_. You thought… What? You thought I would be upset? That I wouldn't immediately drop everything to be with you and Tali? That I wouldn't want this?"

"No," Ziva said emphatically. "No, that is not true."

"That's what Orli said you told her!" His voice was heated but low, not willing to wake Tali in the next room.

"I wanted to tell you," she said, her voice just as heated and just as low. "I wanted to tell you from the second I found out that I was pregnant. I knew that, for as unexpected as she came to be, that you would do anything to be with her. To be with us. I had to wait, Tony. It killed me, but I had to wait until it was safe."

"Why would Orli—"

"Because that is what I told her," Ziva said matter-of-factly. It had struck Tony as odd, that Orli would be the one Ziva would confide in. The last he checked, Ziva didn't trust Orli and blamed her for breaking up her family. Despite what Orli had claimed in Vance's office, her becoming Ziva's closest confidant about family matters made absolutely no sense at all. "I did not want her to know that I suspected that my life might be in danger."

"From what?"

She gave him a crooked smile. "Well, Tony, Kort did lob a mortar at my house, so I am certain he was on the list." He had to give her that one.

"Well, Ziva, Kort's dead."

"I know that, Tony."

"So, is it safe now?"

She gave him another slight smile. "I am dead, Tony. It does not get safer than this." She became serious. "I do not know if it will ever be completely safe," she admitted. "Kort was working for the Russians, and, well, you saw how many terrorist groups would love to take responsibility for hurting anything that my father had touched. That is why I had to die, and do so in such an obvious manner. It would not be enough to just keep running, and it would not be fair to Tali."

He felt that anger rise up again. "And this is?" he demanded. "To die, to leave her something she had never met, move to a country where she doesn't understand the language?"

Her eyes flashed dangerously. "I did not just leave her with anybody she did not know, Tony. I left her with her father. I left her with _you_." They stared at each other for a long minute before she continued, her voice now without that same heat. "I knew that you would not run away. I knew that you would do anything for Tali, and I knew that you would find me." He blinked in surprise at that last one and opened his mouth to remind her that he thought she was dead, but her hand covered his mouth before he could speak. "You went to the ends of the earth to find me once, Tony, and I knew that you would find me again. Even if you did not know that you needed to, and you did. You are here, Tony. You are in Paris, in this hotel, in this hotel room. You came to find me."

It had been years since they had been in that room, but everything about it was forever seared into his mind, from the couch they both lied about sleeping on to the bed they actually did. It hadn't been the first time they had slept together—that ship had sailed a couple of months after they met, back when casual sex was the only thing either was looking for and the only thing either thought of themselves as capable of—but it had been the first time in a long time, after Rivkin and Somalia and everything else that the world had thrown between them. He had thought that trip to Paris would be a turning point in their relationship, but their relationship had been a complicated one, and for every turning point in one direction, there had been a turning point in another. "I thought…" His voice trailed off as he tried to remember what he did think when he booked those plane tickets, when he chose that hotel, when he requested that room. The original plan had been to go to Israel first, to try to figure out what had happened, what Ziva had been doing since they had parted ways, to see if there was more to the story than Kort trying to cover his tracks by calling in an attack on a seemingly-innocent farmhouse that just happened to contain Ziva. And Tali.

But at the last minute, instead of buying tickets for Tel Aviv, he decided to change the order of things, to show Paris to Tali, then look for answers.

Or maybe he thought the answers would be in Paris.

"Who was in the house, Ziva?" he asked.

"Nobody," she said. "There was no body, Tony."

"And Tali?" he demanded. "You just left her there alone?"

"No!" she said emphatically, her eyes wide. "She was in a neighbor's house. An elderly couple. I had been working late, after her bedtime. I would take her to their house and pick her up when I returned home. Sometimes, I would leave her there overnight. When my house had been destroyed and I had not picked her up, they told the authorities that they were certain I had returned home too late or too tired to pick up Tali and gone straight home and had died in the attack. They took Tali to Orli, as they were directed to if anything happened to me. She brought her to you."

Before he could ask the next question, they heard the sounds of a toddler wakening from her nap. Both parents stood, then stopped as they looked at each other, both unsure what to do and how to parent with someone else. "I'll get her," DiNozzo finally said.

He returned a few minutes later with Tali, her light curls knotted with sleep, her small fist rubbing sleep from eyes. " _Ima!_ " she exclaimed when her eyes fell on Ziva, immediately fighting against Tony's arms to reach for her mother.

DiNozzo handed her off to Ziva and she immediately began chattering away in Hebrew in a way that she never had around him, her voice sounding excited, and for a long minute, Tony just stood there and watched mother and daughter. Ziva was animated, her whole attention focused on Tali as they talked, and he realized two things in that moment: that Ziva was a great mother, and that he wasn't going to let either of them out of his sight.


	2. Chapter 2

**More Than Family: Chapter 2**

 _A/N: Thanks for the reviews! I'm glad you're enjoying this as much as I am. Well, maybe not quite as much. I'm really having fun writing this._

* * *

They had checked out of that hotel as soon as they packed up Tony and Tali's things, and then walked a couple of blocks to the hotel Ziva had checked into the day before, under another one of those assumed identities she slipped into as easily as a pair of jeans.

They walked to a nearby park, where the parents sat down on a bench and Tali amused herself by spinning around in a circle until she fell down, giggling dizzily until she regained her equilibrium and started the whole routine over again. "She is very much your daughter," Ziva said with a smile as they watched the display. DiNozzo snorted.

"That endless energy? That's all you," he replied. Her smile widened as she tilted her head in acknowledgement.

"She is always having a good time," Ziva said, "even if all she is doing is spinning around in circles, not going anywhere."

He didn't say anything to that, not wanting to get into an argument about how much her leaving hurt him, or how confused Tali had been about her mother not being around—or maybe that was just him projecting, because that fun-loving, high-energy child had never been taught English and they were still learning how to communicate, which had led to a number of all-out meltdown temper tantrums from her and too many moments of despair from him, of frustration at not being about to communicate with his daughter, of thinking there was no way he would ever learn how to be a parent and so much anger at Ziva for leaving him in that situation.

"What were you doing for work?" he asked instead, honestly curious about what a Mossad officer turned NCIS special agent had been doing in the years she had been living in Israel.

"I taught," she replied simply. He frowned.

"Teaching?" he asked. "As in, teaching future Mossad officers how to disarm a horde of angry bad guys—"

"I taught French and English at a primary school," she said with a smile. He finally turned to face her, a confused look on his face and an amused one on hers. She opened her mouth to defend her chosen occupation, but he was faster.

"You taught English?" he asked incredulously. "You mean there are now classes worth of Israeli primary school students who think they need to 'take a kite' and have no idea what the pot calls the kettle?"

She smacked him lightly on the arm, even as she started laughing. "English is not that easy to learn, Tony," she mock-scolded. "And you enjoyed correcting me."

"I did," he replied. For a long minute, their eyes locked. "I missed that laugh," he finally said softly.

"I missed you," she replied. And then he did something he thought he'd never get to do again: he leaned forward and kissed her.

Their moment was very quickly interrupted by a small hand insistently hitting his knee, and he turned to see Tali standing there with an impatient look on her face that she got directly from her mother. She said something to her father, of which he only caught the word _Abba_. "She wants you to play with her," Ziva translated.

"Well, that's easy enough," Tony said, earning a peal of laughter when he tickled Tali as he got up from the bench. They played a kind of game of tag, in which he would chase her and tickle her, and then she would chase him and launch herself at his leg as if she was trying to tackle him. They did this for a few rounds, before he feigned collapsing to the ground when she tackled him, earning a delighted shriek before she pounced on him in some sort of WWE move that there was no way she should have known how to do.

She was still giggling as she pressed her hands to his face, saying something from a few inches away that he couldn't understand, and again he felt that newly-familiar frustration at not knowing how to communicate with his own child.

He looked toward the bench to see Ziva watching them with an expression that was mostly amused, but with something else in there, something sentimental, and seeing it on her face, he suddenly felt it within him. He may not know how to communicate with his daughter, but he knew her and got to play with her, and got to do all that with her mother watching. For someone who never thought parenting was for him, and then it had it thrust upon him when everyone thought Ziva had been killed… "Go get _Ima_ ," he said to Tali, pointing at Ziva. He had no idea if she understood any part of that sentence other than _Ima_ , but it was enough for her to smile and laugh, run toward her mother, and pull insistently on her hand until she laughed and got up to walk toward where Tony was still laying on the grass.

He knew for sure that she had been letting her Mossad training and instincts lapse when he was able to use his legs to sweep hers out from under her, and knew at her smile at Tali's laughter that she didn't mind at all.

* * *

It wasn't until later that night, long after Tali had fallen asleep, that it all hit DiNozzo: everything that he had accepted as fact for the last several weeks—that Ziva had been killed, that he was the only thing Tali had—wasn't true. Ziva was alive, Tali had both of her parents, and there was really only one way that both of those things could remain true.

He rolled over in bed and wasn't surprised to see Ziva still awake, watching him. For a long minute, they just stared at each other. "How are we going to do this?" he finally asked, his voice low.

"I can reach out to one of my contacts and get us new identities," she said. "I have a person in Switzerland who can move our bank accounts in a way that nobody would be able to find us. We will need to find a place that is safe, where no one will think to look for us."

He only needed a minute to think about that. "Canada," he said. "It's safe. Everyone likes Canadians, and why wouldn't they? They're very polite. And who would think to look for a dead former Mossad agent or former NCIS agent and toddler in Canada?"

She thought about that for a moment and nodded in agreement. "Canada is good," she said. She hesitated before saying what they were both thinking: "You will have to disappear, Tony. You will not be able to talk to anyone you know again. You will never see them again. Not Senior. Not McGee. Abby, Ducky, Palmer—"

"I know."

"And definitely not Gibbs," she finished.

He nodded. "I will not lose you and Tali again, Ziva. I can't. I don't care about anything else, just being with you two."

* * *

Two weeks later, Anthony Johnson enrolled in a six-week night course for French language immersion. Most of his classmates were refugees from the various conflicts in the Middle East, most had left professional jobs and were relegated to laboring jobs during the day that didn't require much language proficiency. They still dreamed of returning to their previous occupations, but knew that wouldn't be possible in France without speaking the language. The Englishman didn't interact with them much, and they likewise left him alone. By the end of the course, all anyone knew about him was that he took care of his daughter during the day, while his wife worked. She took care of the girl at night, while he was at school.

* * *

Sarah Kaufman returned from work the day before their flight with an engagement ring and two wedding bands. "We will need these," she said, beginning to hand over the man's ring to her husband.

"Uh-uh," Tony said, stopping her. "We do this, we do it right. The sappy romantic scene in the movie and all." Before she could protest or even roll her eyes, he took the woman's wedding band from her and grabbed her left hand.

"I, Tony, take you, Ziva—"

"Sarah," she corrected. The look he gave her made it very clear it wasn't an accident.

"To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, something about richer or poorer, until death do us part. For real this time," he finished as he slid the ring on her finger.

She smiled slightly and held up his ring. He obliged and handed over his hand. "Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel."

"Now this is the part where I get to kiss the bride, right?" He didn't wait for a response before he did just that. "Happy anniversary. Sarah."

The marriage certificate was dated three years before, on October 3, 2013. The day Tony DiNozzo found Ziva David in the house where she was born.

* * *

Three weeks after the Kaufman family—Anthony, Sarah, and their two-year-old daughter, Natalie, who went by Tali—moved to Montreal, Quebec, they were finally settled to the point that Sarah could start planning for things further than one week in the future, and she decided to start with finding a pre-school for Tali.

The first school on the list was a pre-school out of the local synagogue, so Sarah bundled up Tali—it may not yet be Halloween, but she was quickly learning that Quebec was cold—and they walked the several blocks to the synagogue. "Are you members of the synagogue?" the secretary at the pre-school asked when Sarah introduced herself.

"Not yet," Sarah said smoothly. "We just moved to the neighborhood."

"Oh!" the secretary said with a wide smile. "Where did you move from?"

"Paris," Sarah said as she adjusted Tali on her hip. The secretary's eyes widened.

"Oh!" she repeated. "What brings you to Canada?"

"We are Canadian," Sarah explained with a smile. "I am Quebecois and my husband is from Saskatchewan. We had been living in France for the past five years for my husband's work, but, well, Europe has been getting increasingly unsafe. We love Paris, but now we have Tali's safety to think of." She smiled over at her daughter, and then back at the secretary. "We are very happy to be home."


	3. Chapter 3

**More Than Family: Chapter 3**

 _A/N: Long chapter, but I promised three chapters, so here it is. I hope you enjoy the new ending for our (at least, my) favorite characters._

* * *

December 2026

Leroy Jethro Gibbs, retired NCIS special agent and current private investigator, brought his cup of coffee to his lips, his eyes not leaving the West Vancouver house.

It had been almost ten years, filled with false leads and dead ends, but this time, he was sure he had the right house, the right family. He felt it in his gut.

Two hours after he arrived, an SUV approached and the garage door began rolling open. Gibbs could see that the driver was a middle-aged man, but from that distance, that was about all he could tell. There was no one in the front passenger seats, but he couldn't tell if there was anyone in any of the rear seats. According to the research he had done on this family—and he had done quite a lot—Kaufman and his wife, Sarah, had three kids: twelve-year-old Natalie, with a birth certificate from France, and seven-year-old twins, Alexander and Isabelle. If this was who he was looking for, if it was his former senior field agent, Natalie was really Tali. It was the twins and the wife that gave him the only feelings of doubt that Kaufman might be his man. According to the records he could find, Kaufman had been married once, and on the date of his marriage certificate, DiNozzo had been far away from France, searching for a woman very different than the schoolteacher he was married to.

The lights had already been on in the house and the car wasn't at the best angle to see any movement through the living room window, so Gibbs had no indication of where Kaufman—maybe DiNozzo, maybe just some poor sap Gibbs had been tracking—was in the house, but he figured that he'd give the man ten or fifteen minutes to get settled before he disturbed him. Just enough time to get comfortable, because people who were comfortable made mistakes.

Who was he kidding? If it was DiNozzo, he had successfully kept Gibbs, and everyone else, off his tail for a decade, and even the DiNozzo who worked for him rarely made mistakes big enough to make a difference. A little comfort wouldn't make a difference either way.

After the fifteen minutes were up and the coffee was drained, Gibbs stepped out of the car and walked across the street, for the first time uncertain about how this was going to go. If Kaufman really was Kaufman, he'd offer a quick apology and be on the next flight back to DC. But if Kaufman was DiNozzo… At one point in time, he could have guessed how his senior field agent would have reacted to being caught hiding with an assumed identity. Now, he wasn't sure.

He heard the doorbell echo through the house after he pressed it, followed immediately by a young voice calling out _I'll get it!_ and the sound of footsteps running toward the door. A few seconds later, the door opened to reveal a small boy, dark hair in disarray and dark eyes looking curiously up at him. "Hello, can I help you?" he asked politely, and Gibbs couldn't help but smile.

"Hello," he replied. "Can I talk to Mr. Kaufman?"

The boy stood up straighter, a look akin to pride on his face. "I'm Mr. Kaufman," he said confidently, and this time, Gibbs couldn't help but laugh.

"Is your father home?" he asked.

"Dad!" the boy—Alexander—called back into the house.

"Who is it?" a voice called back, and Gibbs knew that he had finally found the right house, the right family.

"I don't know," Alexander replied. His words were met with a chuckle, which died abruptly when the man rounded a corner and saw who was standing there.

For the first time in over a decade, Gibbs found himself face-to-face with Anthony DiNozzo. There were more wrinkles around the eyes, more gray in the shorter hair, but it was definitely DiNozzo.

"Sarah," DiNozzo said, his eyes not leaving Gibbs, and a few seconds later, any satisfaction Gibbs had from finding DiNozzo was immediately replaced with disbelief.

Ziva David stepped out of the kitchen, a plate of what was obviously part of their dinner in her hands.

"Hello, Gibbs," she said calmly, as if being dead and seeing her former supervisor at the door of her home was something that happened every day. "Come in. It's freezing out there. Alex, show Mr. Gibbs where he can hang his coat. Izzy, please set another place at the table for our guest."

She didn't sound like Ziva—she sounded like a Canadian—but at the same time, she sounded exactly like her.

"How—" Gibbs started, before he cut himself out, not sure how to end that question.

"It's a long story, Gibbs," Ziva—Sarah?—said, sounding amused. "But it's time for dinner. Tali, please light the Shabbat candles."

Gibbs found himself seated at the table between DiNozzo at the head and Alex in the chair next to him, directly across from Tali, who would occasionally look at him with an expression Gibbs knew all too well, one that her mother had often worn when she was trying to figure something out. She didn't say much through dinner, but her younger brother and sister picked up the slack, peppering Gibbs with questions about who he was and how he knew their parents, and he honestly didn't know how he was supposed to answer them.

After dinner, Ziva asked the kids to clear the table and clean the kitchen, and then instructed Tali to make sure Alex and Izzy finished their homework before they got on the TV. "Mom and I are going to be in the basement, talking to Mr. Gibbs," DiNozzo said. "Don't disturb us unless anyone needs to go to the hospital." Tali and Izzy rolled their eyes, obviously having heard that many times; Alex didn't seem to notice.

Not surprisingly, knowing DiNozzo, they had a fully finished basement, with exercise equipment in one corner, a bar in another, and what appeared to be a home theater system on the other side. "Tony still enjoys his movies," Ziva said dryly when she noticed where Gibbs was looking.

"I'm assuming bourbon is still your drink of choice?" DiNozzo asked Gibbs, holding up a bottle from the bar. He began pouring without waiting for a response, and then another for himself and one for Ziva. "How did you find us?" he asked, his voice devoid of any of the levity it had when upstairs with his children. "After all, you were the one who told me that if Ziva David wants to disappear, I'm not going to find her."

"And yet you did," Gibbs said, his eyes going from one former agent to the other. "Twice."

DiNozzo shook his head slightly. " _She_ found _me_ the second time."

Gibbs didn't answer the question; not really, anyway. "Anthony DiNozzo checked into a hotel in Paris with his daughter and paid for two weeks. After three days, he abruptly checked out early. Last sighting of him was an ATM camera when he pulled money out the next day. Day after that, all of his accounts and investments were moved to a Swiss bank account." He swirled the liquor in his class without looking at it. "Senior hired me to find you two months later. He died, four years ago."

DiNozzo nodded. "I know," he said simply.

"So how did you do it?" Gibbs asked. "Or maybe, the better question is, why?"

* * *

Unbeknownst to her parents or the mysterious unexpected guest, Tali Kaufman had quietly opened the basement door and just as quietly closed it behind her before taking a seat near the top of the stairs, where she knew from experience she could hear everything discussed at the bar without being seen, and there she sat, at times biting her knuckle to keep from making any noise, as she listened to her parents describe how they had moved money from one account to another, how they had changed identities, her father learning a new language, moving from one place to another quickly throughout Europe before making their way to Quebec and then, finally, the summer Tali turned five, making their final move to Vancouver.

Who were those people? What had they done? Her mother taught Hebrew and French at the Jewish private school, and her father casted extras for the movie and TV studios. They weren't the type of people who even knew _how_ to do what they were talking about, and weren't nearly interesting enough to need to.

"As far as the why, Gibbs, I don't think you need to guess on that one. You met every reason why already," her father said, and then there was a pause. "Tali, well, she's her mother's daughter. She is so strong, and so talented. It might just be proud dad talking, but everything she touches turns to gold. We keep telling her that she needs to cut back on the activities, because between school and ballet and piano and ski team, I don't know how any of us sleep. I don't know how she's going to pick what to do, though, because she's so good at all of them. And then she decided that she's going to have a _bat mitzvah_ , so starting in January, she's going to be in classes at the synagogue for three hours a week."

"Wasn't aware that that was your thing," Gibbs commented, and Tali wondered at that. Their last name was Kaufman; was he surprised that they were Jewish?

"And then there's the twins—"

"I wanted a boy and a girl, back when I was young enough to think that was a good idea," her mother said.

"Then we got Izzy as a bonus," her father said, and Tali smiled at the smile in his voice. "Izzy's definitely mine. She couldn't care less about her schoolwork, no matter how much we threaten or bribe her, but she has yet to met a sport she hasn't excelled at. She plays for a U-10 hockey team, because she's too aggressive for the U-8 team. She plays soccer in the summer and has recently decided that she's going to take years off our lives by taking up mountain biking. And Alex… I don't know where he came from. He's at least ten times smarter than I am and an all-around good kid. I don't think anyone ever described either of us that way." There was another pause from down in the basement before her father continued. "I will do anything for them, Gibbs. I will go to any lengths of the earth."

"I know," Gibbs replied. "They want to see you again. Both of you, if they only knew that was an option. And the kids."

"No." The single syllable, spoken so forcefully from her usually laid-back father, made Tali's eyes widen. "Gibbs, this is my family. I have to put them first. Tali…"

"She's very smart, Gibbs," her mother chimed in when her father's voice trailed off. "She does what her father does and downplays that, but she's observant. Nothing gets by her. She has started to ask questions we don't have the answers to. To meet people her parents should have no way of knowing… It is not a good idea."

"She's met them before."

"She wasn't even two yet!" her father exclaimed. "Let me have my family, Gibbs."

"No." The word was out of Tali's lips before she could stop it, and she heard all three adults below her freeze at the sound.

"Tali?" her father finally asked. He had gotten up from the couch at the bar and was now standing at the bottom of the stairs. His face softened. "Tali, you weren't supposed to be listening."

"But I did," she said, feeling her throat getting thick. "Dad, this isn't just _your family_. This is my _life_. Who _are_ you? How do I have memories of places of places I've never been? Why do I sometimes dream in Hebrew, when I was born in France and lived in Montreal and Vancouver? I remember Gibbs!"

"You do?" her father asked, confused.

"Yeah. I mean, I think so." She stopped and looked down at her hands on her lap. "I remember being lost. Not lost lost, just… like I didn't know what was going on. Scared. There were new people around and I didn't know anybody and didn't know what anyone was saying, but people kept looking at me like I was supposed to, and I remember…" She tried to remember what it was. "Calm. It was calm. And smelled like wood." She felt her eyes filling with tears and wiped at them angrily. "How do I know those things? Who am I, Dad? Am I even Canadian?"

"You are American." Her mother appeared next to her father at the bottom of the stairs. "And Israeli. You were born in Israel. Tali, come downstairs." She reluctantly rose from her seat and descended to where her parents stood, and was surprised to see that her mother was crying. Her entire life, she didn't think she had ever seen her mother crying, even when the twins were little and her mother wasn't sleeping at all.

"I was a strong girl, Tali, almost as strong as you, but I wasn't strong enough to keep from getting pulled into my father's world," her mother began, smoothing Tali's ponytailed hair back. For the first time, Tali realized she was almost as tall as her mother, who had always seemed so large to her. "He was Mossad, and so was I. When I went to DC to…on a mission, I met your father and Gibbs and decided to stay and work with them for a little while." She gave a slight smile. "It ended up being several years."

Tali's eyes widened as she looked over at her father. "You were a spy?" she asked, incredulous.

"Me?" he asked with a laugh. "Oh, no. That was all your mother. I was law enforcement."

"You were a _cop_?" Somehow, that seemed even stranger.

"And a damn fine one," Gibbs said, still sitting in the chair by the bar. "Your mom, too."

"Like, a sheriff or FBI or something?"

"NCIS," her father said.

"Who?" Tali asked, and to her surprise, her father chuckled and wrapped her in a hug.

"Pretty much," he replied lightly.

"Tali," her mother said gently, getting her back on track. "I eventually left Mossad, became an American citizen, but…" She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, her words were coming out faster and with an accent that Tali couldn't place. "I tried to run away from who I was, but I could not. Israeli, American, Mossad, NCIS… It did not matter, I was who I was. I was always surrounded by death, by people killing each other and wanting me dead and I could not escape that. And then my father was killed, and I _ran_. I ran away, but your father found me, because he knew me better than I knew myself, but I would not let him take me back to DC. I knew that if I went back there, I would always be the same, would always be that girl who became sucked into my father's world." The tears continued to fall from her mother's eyes, but she did nothing to wipe them away, keeping her hands on Tali's face. "Tali, my wonderful Tali, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. You showed me that not everything that comes from me is poison. Seeing you, that was the first time I actually believed that I could be someone other than that girl who got sucked into her father's world. You were so full of joy and light, and I knew I could not let the darkness of my previous life touch you."

"Is that why you guys ran away?"

Her parents looked at each other before her mother shook her head. "Someone attacked the house where we were living. Everyone thought I was killed in the fire, and I used that to my advantage. You went to DC to be with your father."

"That's why there aren't any pictures of us together when you were a baby," her father said. "I didn't know about you until you were almost two, but as soon as I met you, you were all that mattered. I thought I was your everything, Tali, but really, you were my everything. I wanted nothing more than to be with you."

"But if you thought Mom was dead…" Tali's voice trailed off, not knowing where the story was going.

"I took you to Paris," her father said. "And that's where your mother found us. That's when we changed our identities and moved to Canada."

"But if that was a decade ago… Aren't all the people who want you dead gone now? Can't you go back?"

"Go back to what, Tali?" her mother asked. "This is my life—our life. I have been happier in the last ten years than any other time in my life. I have you, and your brother and sister and your father, and that is all that I need. There is nothing in my old life that I need." Her voice became insistent again. "This is the life that I imagined I would have, when I was young enough to imagine such things."

"But what about the life I was supposed to have?" Tali asked, and to her surprise, her mother smiled at that.

"Tali," she said gently. "This is the life you were supposed to have. You were always supposed to be safe, to have ballet lessons and piano lessons and a _bat mitzvah_ and a little brother and sister. I am not so sure if the ski slopes were pre-destined, but you seem to enjoy them."

It hit her all that once: everything that her parents did, the running, the new identities, that was for her, to make sure that she had the things that she had. "So, you guys left your lives for me?" she asked, her voice small.

"No," her father said, and Tali was surprised to discover that he was crying, too. "Tali, we didn't leave our lives. You _are_ our life. You and Alex and Izzy. You were right; this is more than a family, because this is everything. From the first time I saw you, I would have given you the world if I could."

That was about as much as Tali could take, and she threw her arms around her parents as she sobbed. She didn't know if she would continue to have those dreams when she was running through an olive grove with the sun on her face and her mother's laugh behind her, or sipping tea with a grandfatherly-like man who kept spilling it on himself, but she was pretty sure that if she did, that they wouldn't scare her anymore.


End file.
